Marketing is . . .

It’s not easy to buy your way into the hearts and minds of people anymore.

Marketing used to depend a lot on the size of your wallet. If you spent enough on TV and print ads, you could pretty much guarantee awareness. If you had all that money for media and you used a good creative agency, the results you wanted were likely to come.

Today you need more. You need to build a relationship, tell a good story, teach a new lesson. Lucky for those of us who don’t have the budget for agencies. We really can do it ourselves. But, if you’re doing it yourself, you’ll need to develop (or hire someone with) one skill in particular.

Writing.

Good writing is what helps people connect with you, with your mission and with your product. Whether it’s a 120-character tweet or a 1,000-word blog post. If you’re a marketer, that writing is not a poem or a short story, it’s a long (years long) series that keeps people coming back again and again.

Good writing has a unique voice and point of view that sets you apart from the other businesses offering the same product.

Good writing is a gift to the reader—a gift of knowledge. Anyone who wants to learn what you have to teach will commit to you.

Good writing reaches out and touches something beyond the rational mind. When you touch peoples’ emotions, your message sticks. When you don’t, you’re roadkill in the game of who is cheapest.

So, if you bombed the verbal section of the SATs or avoided reading great fiction, or didn’t take the importance of developing your ability to communicate with words seriously because you figured you’d be selling widgets, start now.

Marketing is communicating.

The ever growing importance of social media requires that key people in a company participate. Your community will want to hear from you, not just from a representative who communicates behind the corporate “we.” Are you ready for your closeup?

Marketing also means relationship-building to customers. That is the main reason why many people are so ‘gaga’ over social media sites such as FaceBook and Twitter. Marketers are using the social media to their advantage due to this reason. And yes, to do so ‘communicating’ is significant.

Both of these aspects of marketing, relationship-building and communication, are key factors in the increasing amount of murky marketing, or as Rob Walker calls it in his book Buying In, “murketing.” The process of generating this communication and establishing this relationship is arguably more complex and competitive than it ever has been before. With that said, marketers have even more room for creativity and an even greater access to consumers, as the lines between producers, consumers and product continue to blur.

I’ve been studying how marketing is changing over the past few years, and you’re spot on with what you say here. Now marketing needn’t need big budgets, but it definitely needs a big heart. One of the hardest thing for entrepreneurs to understand now is that the highest return on investment will come from GIVING. From generously providing your clients, customers and readers with as much value as possible. Do all you can for them. Go way beyond the call of duty. Because this is how social proof works. You need people to be talking about you. If they’re not, you’ll be without a paddle. And the way to get people talking about you is to give them so much more than they anticipated. This is the way marketing is going, and I love the fact that this way of thinking is beginning to spread further afield over the past couple of years

One of the nice side effects of social media and digital marketing in general is that the transparency, openness and public nature of the conversation keeps people honest and they are motivated to be generous because generosity works. Tanks for your comment.

Discover Resources For Social Media Marketing

Social media helps you do what you've been doing all along if you care deeply about your customers.All you need are some guiding principles.